Interview: Andrew Whitehurst talks Ex-Machina

Ex-Machina emerged the big winner over the weekend at the British Independent Film Awards, scooping up four prizes including; Best British Independent Film, Best Director, Best Screenplay, and Outstanding Achievement in Craft. I sat down with visual effects master, Andrew Whitehurst to find out how he brought Ava to life.

AD:  How did you actually get involved in the film?

Andrew Whitehurst: Well, Alex [Garland] came to Double Negative, the company I work for. He already had some concept up that he had been working on with a comic book artist called Jock. [Alex] came with Andrew Macdonald and Allon [Reich], the producers, to discuss the designs and how the designs might be worked up and modified in advance to create the character out of the budget they had to work with. The good examples of production were we were brought in very early on and so we were all able to discuss ideas together that we could create something that was going to be visually striking enough, but could also be practically achieved given the restrictions of time. That was about six months before principal photography started and in that period, between the first meetings and the start of the shoot, was refining the design, both in terms of initial concept painting and laterally, in terms of building the character in the computer. By the time that we actually started shooting, we had pretty much a finished look and design which is helpful for everyone on set to be able to see what she was ultimately going to end up looking like. Also, because we needed to 3-D print parts of her skeleton for the laboratory set so we needed to have things that we could hand over to the art department to enable them to get her printed out.

AD: How did you actually design and develop Ava?

AW: I think it helps that Alex and I have lots of shared design beliefs and visual interests. The rule that I made for everybody who I was working with was that no one was allowed to look at other robots, but we did put together a lot of reference imagery of things like Formula 1 car suspension or very high end road bicycles. Anything where strength and weight was an important design configuration. So would then look at those and then we’d look at human anatomy and then try and build shapes. That made mechanically sense, but also had an aesthetic, so it was really trying to make form follow function as much as possible. We didn’t want to cheat so there was no part of Ava that didn’t articulate properly, there was no dodginess with pieces of her intersecting with herself when they shouldn’t, that kind of thing. So mechanically, she made sense. I think that, to me, was very important because, possibly even self-consciously, you kind of know when something moves right and feels right. By being diligent and disciplined we were able to enforce that.

On top of that, there were lots of imagery, and looking back on her now, I don’t think there was anything particularly discussed at the time, but there’s a French comic book artist called Moebius, who was very popular in the seventies and eighties, that Alex and I both are massive fans of. When I look at Ava now, I definitely see, if it may only have been subconscious, a Moebius influence happening there. In terms of the actual process of doing it, we would design something, either by drawing it or building something in the computer, look at it with Alex, and then he and I would often sit down with print outs of the design and a bunch of black paper and bunch of Sharpies and we would just sit and draw ideas and discuss things backwards and forwards, like that in a visual way. Then, we could go and take that and go and take that and incorporate that into the next version of the design and we just did that for three or four months.

AD: I read somewhere that you worked with no green screen. Is that correct?

AW: We used no green screen at all. There are two reasons for that. One, was that the speed that we were shooting at, the shoot was only six weeks long and we were doing between 15-25 setups a day, there just isn’t the time to correctly light a green screen and everything else when you’re shooting at that rate. The other reason for not doing it was more of a psychological one for everybody on set. Ultimately, the film is a series of conversations between characters and, for it to work dramatically, you need to be able to buy into what the actors are giving you. We felt that anything we were putting, that was distracting to them or felt weird and was taking away from the enclosed environment for the set, would not help. We just made the decision that were going to design our way of working from the idea of not having green screens up. That was what we went with.

AD: You went from working on Skyfall before coming into this film, which is ten times bigger with a bigger budget. What challenges did you have going from that into something smaller?

AW: It’s not so much a challenge; its definitely a different way of working, in as much as, if you have a smaller group of people if you’re doing a lower budget film, you can make big decisions after you’re light on your feet, I think. If you’re working on a massive budget film, it’s a little like steering a super tanker. It’s a difference between running a little company that makes something and a massive company that kind of makes the same thing, but on a much larger scale. It’s more of the managerial side and your ability to work quickly that is diminished by scale. What is given to you by a large project is that you have less of a financial constraint so, theoretically, you can do more, but, I think you lose some efficiency in that. And certainly with Ex-Machina, it was very much a team game, in that I think every department really wanted to work together and was willing to contribute their ideas, but were also willing to listen to everybody else’s and then collectively come up with what we could do to get the best bang for buck on screen.

AD: Just going back to the performances, Alicia is really excellent in the film and the whole film is great work. How did you actually capture her performance as Ava?

AW: We didn’t do any motion capture, again because it needed to feel like this conversation between two actors so you need to film two actors having a conversation together and they need to get as involved in that as they want to. That kind of rules out motion capture because it’s sort of clunky and its slow and you generally have to film in a different location and all of that. So what we did when we were designing Ava, we incorporated into the design of her, these sort of rubber rings that go around her arms, wrists, and ankles that had these brass studs in. This was actually built into the costume and they’re there on screen and in the finished robot design. They were put there because they helped us to track her performance when we got the images back from the camera. The way that we worked was that we would shoot the scene as you would any dialogue scene with both of them there with Ava in her costume. When they took enough takes and they were happy and about to move on, the actors would step out and we would shoot the same camera movement again, but with no one there so we’d have a clean plate. Then, with that information and other information we gathered, we were able to clean out parts of Alicia we that we wanted to replace with CG and keep the face, hands, and the feet as her real hands, feet, and face from the original plate and replace the rest with computer graphics that we were able to prep because we had these markers built into her costume.

AD: Two of my favorite scenes in the whole movie are the dance scene, I think that’s one of the best scenes of the year, and also the scene where Ava puts her clothes on. Can you tell me about that scene?

AW: I think that might be, from the point of view from our work, my favorite scene. Again, it was shot in the same way. It’s all handheld so Rob [Hardy], the DP, was also operating and he was right in there with her and they were just sort of working together with Alex and choosing whatever they wanted, in terms of the performance. Then, we tracked her, which was a much more difficult challenge in terms of rebuilding the plate where we needed to paint Alicia out. Not only did we need to put the background in, but, for example when she’s pulling stockings on, we need to create the inside of the back of the stockings, as it were. That was an awful lot of paperwork and animation to get that to work properly. It’s a subtle and beautiful moment and it’s rare in visual effects that you get to do subtle and beautiful. It tends to be more bombastic, so it was a real treat. It was harder to do than most of the other shots, but it was done in the same way.

AD: I absolutely love it. It sticks with you, that whole sequence. And the other thing is I want to know what did you and Alex say to each other because you end up falling in love with Ava. What conversations do you have for that to even happen?

AW: It’s the sort of conversation that everyone had because you need to believe that she is always a machine. But, then, yes you do fall in love with her. I mean, a huge amount of that is down to Alicia, the performance is phenomenal. She gives the movement to Ava and we copy the movement that she did and then add the CG in there. I think, from a design point of view, she needed to feel mechanical, but not in a heavily steam-punk way. She needed to feel mechanically plausible, but also very elegant as well. From an industrial design point of view, we tried to make her as elegant and beautiful as we could. We had to choose what kind of metal to make her bones out of; do you want it to be aluminum, or chrome, or titanium?

We did an awful lot of testing of certain essential tests to see which one we feel catches the light most pleasingly. We were very lucky in the way that Rob Hardy lit everything, it was incredibly sympathetic to what we needed to achieve with the visual effects. Then we were also given license to go and tweak some of the lighting on the mechanical parts of it to make her extra beautiful. It was everybody, really. One of my mantras is that is that film making is a team game and certainly, I think, the whole film and Ava in particular is an absolutely perfect example of every single department involved, whether it’s prosthetics or the costume or makeup or us or camera or the actors or screenplay or directing, everybody is contributing something. And once you’ve got that and it’s beautifully cut together, then the magic happens.

AD: How many visual effects shots were in the final film?

AW: I think, with the shots of the robots, it’s about 350, which is not a particularly high number, in terms of modern films with a big visual effects content. The difference is that the number of shots in the film of Ex Machina is way lower than an average film. The shots run very long, I think the average shot length that we were working on was about eight seconds. Whereas, on a more standard Hollywood actiony, visual effects movie, you’re maybe looking at average amount of two or three seconds. So, really, the number of shots lower, in terms of the actual screen time, it’s still a long time.

AD: So what’s next for you?

AW: I have just finished working on Spectre and I will be starting Alex’s next project in January, I hope.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYGzRB4Pnq8